Dear Nintendo: you've had a great couple of months. The Wii is awesome, the DS still sells out everywhere, and everyone is pumped about your upcoming games (except maybe Wii Play). It's totally cool if you just want to take a break for a while, recharge your batteries and come back refreshed. You're starting to run out of ideas, and it shows.

Last night, Nintendo launched the Everybody Votes channel on the Wii. It's a polling/survey system that lets Wii users log in and answer various, seemingly random questions. They vote by dragging their Mii avatars over the preferred answer and dropping them. After they vote, they can then drag their Miis around again and predict which option will win when the results are tallied the next day.

gonintendo.com

So far the questions have been simple and sound benign, such as "Do you prefer dogs or cats?" or "Are roses or chocolates more romantic?" That puts Everybody Votes at approximately the same level of statistical significance as Rate My Kitten. I guess it could be fun if you have absolutely nothing else to do on your Wii, but otherwise Everybody Votes seems like a filler feature. It's like Nintendo just put it in there so people would have something more to do with their Miis.

Nintendo hasn't been totally slacking on the Wii, however. On Monday, Virtual Console added three classic NES games to its library. Kirby's Adventure, Ice Climbers, and Kid Icarus make for a Super Smash Bros. trifecta. They're 500 points or $5 each, and they harken back to a day when games were simpler, more elegant, and--in Kid Icarus' case--much, much harder.